Charles Émile Jacque’s etching, “Le Petit Faune”, 1845, after Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Charles Émile Jacque (1813–1894)

“Le Petit Faune” (title on plate), 1845, after Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s (aka Giambattista Tiepolo) (1696–1770) etching of the same subject in reverse (see http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.35112), printed by Auguste Delâtre (1822–1907) and published in “L’Artiste” in 1846.

Etching and drypoint on wove paper with small margins and re-margined with a support sheet.

Size: (support sheet) 35.1 x 38.4 cm; (sheet) 20 x 23.7 cm; (plate) 16.4 x 19.4 cm; (image borderline) 14.2 x 17.3 cm

Lettered on the plate above the image borderline: (centre) “L’ARTISTE.”

Inscribed on the plate within the image borderline: (on the Tambourine) “Tiepolo”

Lettered on the plate below the image borderline: (centre) “LE PETIT FAUNE / Gravé par CH. JACQUES d’aprés / TIEPOLO”; (left) “...[?] Delȃtre fres imp”

Condition: richly inked and crisp impression in near pristine condition (i.e. there are no tears, holes, folds, stains, abrasions or foxing). The sheet has been re-margined with a support sheet of archival (millennium quality) washi paper.

I am selling this beautifully preserved etching by one of the luminaries of the Barbizon School after one of the most famous of all artists, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, for AU$138 (currently US$104.16/EUR88.88/GBP77.94 at the time of posting this print) including postage and handling to anywhere in the world.

If you are interested in purchasing this etching that is seldom seen on the art market, please contact me (oz_jim@printsandprinciples.com) and I will send you a PayPal invoice to make the payment easy.

Although there will always be exceptions to what motivates artists to choose a subject—such as Jacque’s choice to copy this particular composition by Tiepolo­—a theory that was first proposed by Friedrich Shiller in “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (1796) is that artists choose subject matter that helps to satisfy their psychological needs. Or to express this differently, artists choose subject matter that is the complementary opposite of what they normally experience in everyday life to give their lives balance. (For more information about this theory see Alain de Botton & John Armstrong [2013] in “Art as Therapy”, Phaidon Press, London, p. 34.)

Indeed Shiller may be correct in terms of Jacque’s choice to copy this mythological scene of a woman holding a tambourine and the child satyr, Saturn, with an agitated goat behind her. After all, at the time that Jacque was celebrating the natural beauty of his rural lifestyle his world was changing with the spread of the industrial revolution where the only place for idyllic peace was in a fantasy world of mythology.